What do young people want from life? This book shows how the 'internal conversation' guides individual choices.

Introduction; 1. A brief history of how reflexivity becomes imperative; 2. The reflexive imperative versus habits and habitus; 3. Re-conceptualizing socialization as 'relational reflexivity'; 4. Communicative reflexivity and its decline; 5. Autonomous reflexivity: the new spirit of social enterprise; 6. Meta-reflexives: critics of market and state; 7. Fractured reflexives: casualties of the reflexive imperative; Conclusion; Methodological appendix.

Margaret S. Archer is Professor in Social Theory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Directrice of its Centre d'Ontologie Sociale. She was Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick from 1979 until 2010. She has written over twenty books including Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility (2007), Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003) and Being Human: The Problem of Agency (2000).